Branding in the Video game industry

Everywhere we go we are surrounded by brands, be it Coke, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Pfzier, or Disney. The importance (in terms of concepts) of brands can be fairly easy to see, even if you don’t follow or like a specific one, or feel that brands = hype. Successfully branding something means that when someone encounters this specific product, they know or can infer things about it. There’s very little difference between McDonald’s in Canada, USA, England, or Australia and if I’m in a rush and in a foreign country I know several things before even going into a McDonald’s. I roughly know the menu, and I can make a very good assumption about how long it’ll take to make my food, how much it’ll cost, as well as what the fries will taste like. Sure there are a few differences (Lamb burgers for one - in Australia), but by and large the brand “McDonald’s” comes with a few unspoken guarantees. Similarly with other brands, like Coke and it’s taste, and Disney with it’s core films and amusement parks.

In other words, “branding” provides a level of trust which helps us consumers sort through the various offerings. An unknown brand represents an unknown risk. Branding in Media is a little bit different. What makes you think that a movie will be good, the director, actors, the studio, or the writer? Generally Hollywood relies upon the director and actors to sell the movies, thus you have certain actors being able to demand high wages for their work, but are they the brand that people should play attention to? When Disney sent out the release that they are making a new Star Wars, they needed a name to attach to it, eventually settling on JJ Abrams, and hapcounting on his successes to win over fans in the absence of real data (a finished movie). Branding is about information, and Disney wants the information they release to say “give this movie a chance” and “it’s going to be different than the prequels”.

Sometimes there are too many choices.

When it comes to Video games branding comes across a little haphazardly. For every Naughty Dog and Miyamoto, there are hundreds of indie studios, programmers, and writers which remain largely obscure. Brand confusion is further exacerbated by the lack of understanding of the developers role vs the publishers, and that fact that some seem to fill both rolls. Now this is totally the wrong community for this (because we’re generally more knowledgeable), but when you look at Super Mario Galaxy, do you know who the writer is? It’s not Miyamoto. Which studio made the game, the details/team in the games construction so to speak?

All we see is that this is a game from Nintendo. At E3 we get inundated with videos and releases from Sony, Microsoft, EA, Activision, and so on, but should we? The video game sets its brands in titles like Call of Duty, Fifa, Halo, and characters like Mario and Sonic. The question I ask is: is this what branding should be in the video game industry? Should the average consumer go into a store and buy a Halo, because it’s Halo? Should they care who the developer, the director, composer, or voice actors are? If you look at the box art, of say Mass Effect 3, the main pieces of information are the game title, the system, the developer, and the publisher. In a movie like Star Wars, aside from the title, the main pieces include the Actors and Director.

If branding is the idea of relating information about a product, what should be the brands of the video games industry? Should the games industry focus more on branding game directors like Casey Hudson, or Jason Rubin? For better or worse this is an industry in love with its sequels and brands according to that. If we can start to turn away from needing the next COD and start focusing instead on the next Casey Hudson game, I think that we would be better off and see more innovative titles.